1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a high capacitance/low inductance capacitor module that can be coupled to a semiconductive die.
2. Description of Related Art
It is generally desirable to produce integrated circuits (ICs) which require less power and operate at higher speeds than existing devices. The operation of low power/high speed integrated circuits can be effected by the electrical noise generated by the continuous switching of the transistors located in the circuit. It is well known that the inductive noise of an IC can be reduced by connecting decoupling capacitors to the circuit.
U.S. application Ser. No. 07/837,285 filed by Mallick et al., and assigned to the same assignee as the present application, discloses an integrated circuit package which has a number of decoupling capacitors formed on a circuit board located within the package. The circuit board and capacitors are coupled to the semiconductive die by a plurality of parallel wires. The parallelism of the wires increases the inductance of the signals and reduces the effectiveness of the decoupling capacitors. It would therefore be desirable to directly mount the decoupling capacitors to the surface of the die to reduce the line length between the two devices.
To effectively decouple an integrated circuit such as a microprocessor, the capacitors must have a capacitance value between 10 and 200 nanoFaurads (nF) and an inductance of approximately 1 picoHenry (pH). A single conventional capacitor typically has an inductance value of approximately 50 pH. Therefore to create a decoupling capacitance circuit having a net inductance of 1 pH would require the assembly and wiring of 10 discrete capacitors. Assembling multiple discrete elements is time consuming and generally increases the overall cost of producing the IC package. It would therefore be desirable to provide a low inductance decoupling capacitor module which can be efficiently mass produced and easily assembled to the surface of a semiconductive device.